The Volokh Conspiracy

The National Football League has been the most successful professional sports league in the US over the last several decades. But economists Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier argue that tort suits over concussion injuries might lead to its downfall:

Before you say that football is far too big to ever disappear, consider the history: If you look at the stocks in the Fortune 500 from 1983, for example, 40 percent of those companies no longer exist…. Sports are not immune to these pressures. In the first half of the 20th century, the three big sports were baseball, boxing, and horse racing, and today only one of those is still a marquee attraction.

The most plausible route to the death of football starts with liability suits. Precollegiate football is already sustaining 90,000 or more concussions each year. If ex-players start winning judgments, insurance companies might cease to insure colleges and high schools against football-related lawsuits. Coaches, team physicians, and referees would become increasingly nervous about their financial exposure in our litigious society. If you are coaching a high school football team, or refereeing a game as a volunteer, it is sobering to think that you could be hit with a $2 million lawsuit at any point in time. A lot of people will see it as easier to just stay away…. The end result is that the NFL’s feeder system would dry up and advertisers and networks would shy away from associating with the league, owing to adverse publicity and some chance of being named as co-defendants in future lawsuits.

This is a plausible scenario for the demise of professional football. But Cowen and Grier ignore an important countervailing factor: If tort lawsuits start to pose a serious threat to college and professional football, the NFL and other powerful interests that benefit from the sport won’t take it lying down. They will use their considerable lobbying clout to push for changes in tort law. Majority public opinion could well be on their side. Football is an extremely popular support, and many people might reason that the threat of concussion is just one of the risks that players voluntarily take on when they choose to participate in the sport.

Over the last twenty years, many states have enacted strong tort reform laws in order to curb dubious lawsuits that threaten the business climate in their jurisdictions. The reformed states include even the once-notorious “tort hellhole” of Alabama. If tort lawsuits start threatening the NFL, big-time college football, or even high school football in states like Texas, we might well see a new round of reform laws.

It’s possible, of course, that concussion injuries could lead to such a wave of public outrage that the NFL and Division I college football programs will be unable to resist the tide. But I am skeptical. Most fans already know that football is a dangerous sport, and that doesn’t seem to bother most of them much.

Earlier today, the Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins visited the White House. But playoff MVP goaltender Tim Thomas chose not to attend. He issued a very libertarian-seeming statement explaining his reasons:

I believe the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties, and Property of the People.

This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers vision for the Federal government.

Because I believe this, today I exercised my right as a Free Citizen, and did not visit the White House. This was not about politics or party, as in my opinion both parties are responsible for the situation we are in as a country. This was about a choice I had to make as an INDIVIDUAL.

This is the only public statement I will be making on this topic. TT

For reasons I described here, I don’t think we should attach much weight to the political views of sports and entertainment celebrities. That holds true even in the rare cases like this one where a celebrity makes a political statement I agree with. Still, I thought Thomas’ decision was interesting, if only because there are so few libertarian celebrities out there. I don’t know if I would have rejected the invitation to the White House were I in Thomas’ position. But I certainly sympathize with his reasons for doing so, including the point about both parties bearing responsibility for today’s overgrown federal government.

UPDATE: Various media reports indicate that Thomas is a fan of Glenn Beck, who is far from uniformly libertarian, and occasionally endorses ridiculous conservative conspiracy theories. So Thomas may well be more of a conservative himself. That said, the reasons he gave in his statement are ones that most libertarians would agree with.

It’s arguable that Thomas should have gone to the White House anyway, on the grounds that events like this are really about paying tribute to the office of the presidency rather than the policies of the present occupant of it. On the other hand, presidents of both parties do these sorts of events in part because they see a political advantage in it. On balance, if I were Thomas, I would probably have gone to the event anyway, since it doesn’t imply endorsement of the president’s agenda or of the general course of federal policy over the last few years. But I can certainly understand Thomas’ reasons for making the opposite decision.

An Englishman makes a confession: He prefers American football to soccer.

In its energy and complexity, football captures the spirit of America better than any other cultural creation on this continent, and I don’t mean because it features long breaks in which advertisers get to sell beer and treatments for erectile dysfunction. It sits at the intersection of pioneering aggression and impossibly complex strategic planning. It is a collision of Hobbes and Locke; violent, primal force tempered by the most complex set of rules, regulations, procedures and systems ever conceived in an athletic framework.

Soccer is called the beautiful game. But football is chess, played with real pieces that try to knock each other’s brains out. It doesn’t get any more beautiful than that.

I have an occasional series of posts highlighting issues where Barack Obama and I agree. So far, the list includes creating a playoff system for college football, allowing gays in the military, ending the home mortgage interest deduction for high-income taxpayers (though I would go further and abolish the deduction for everyone), the president’s right to forego defending federal statutes he believes to be unconstitutional, and that the Obama health care plan’s individual mandate is not a tax.

I am happy to announce that we have another addition to this distinguished list. Both Obama and I are happy that the NBA lockout seems likely to end soon:

NBA owners and players reached a tentative agreement early Saturday to end the 149-day lockout and hope to begin the delayed season on Christmas Day.

Neither side provided many specifics but said the only words players and fans wanted to hear.

“We want to play basketball,” NBA commissioner David Stern said….

President Barack Obama gave a thumbs-up when told about the tentative settlement after he finished playing basketball at Fort McNair in Washington on Saturday morning.

The shortened season might end up helping veteran teams like my Boston Celtics against younger ones like the Chicago Bulls (Obama’s favorite team). Our agreement on basketball issues might collapse if the president again tries to undermine the confidence of Celtics point guard Rajon Rondo:). Hopefully, Obama won’t want to alienate Celtics fans during an election year.

In order to compete in the Olympics, a horse has to be more than just a horse [HT: Tyler Cowen]. It also has to have the right “nationality”:

Their bond was a gold-medal partnership years in the making — and practically impossible for Canadian equestrian Eric Lamaze to duplicate.

When Lamaze’s horse Hickstead collapsed and died at a competition in Italy on Sunday, it left the world’s No. 1 show jumper mourning his longtime teammate. He also could be without an Olympic-calibre mount less than nine months before the London Games….

“It’s fair to say there certainly isn’t another Hickstead in the world, and that will be a misfortune for Eric,” said Akaash Maharaj, CEO of Equine Canada.

Much like a human athlete who must be a citizen of a country for a required period of time before representing that country in the Olympics, a similar rule applies to horses.

“A horse can only represent a country at the Olympics if he has been owned by his country or a citizen of his country for the requisite amount of time,” said Maharaj.

That deadline is January.

Although I’m no fan of nationalism, it is fun to watch national rivalries play out at the Olympics. And it makes at least some sense to attribute national loyalties to people. When it comes to horses, it seems silly. Olympic equestrian competitors should be able to ride whatever otherwise eligible horses they want, regardless of their “nationality.”

Manhattan Institute scholar Nicole Gelinas has an interesting column about a massive financially dubious parking lot at Yankee Stadium, which Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. claims requires a government bailout to prevent a local financial crisis:

If the Zuccotti kids want to protest Wall Street bailouts, they should go occupy the Yankees’ luxury parking garages in The Bronx. Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. wants to give the garages’ private investors a fat-cat rescue at the expense of Gotham’s Main Street mice.

Four years ago, the Yankees wanted a souped-up parking “system” for their new ballpark, and Mayor Bloomberg obliged. City Hall helped a previously unknown outfit, the Bronx Parking Development Co., borrow $238 million to build and run a $300 million parking paradise on city land under a long-term lease. (The state supplied the balance of the cash.)

ut the mayor didn’t put the city’s credit on the line. Instead, the city’s Industrial Development Agency — which is not guaranteed by city taxpayers — sold the debt to bondholders.

No one ever said so outright, but bondholders were plainly supposed to assume that, because Bronx Parking’s board is stacked with city officials and city officials talked up the bonds, that the city was there should the deal run into trouble.

It sure didn’t make sense on the merits. The old parking lots generated $7 million a year, but the new lots were supposed to pay twice that in annual debt costs. And Bronx Parking can’t just raise prices to fill the gap. Not many folks will pay $35 to park when there’s a new Metro North station right there.

Reality has caught up. Last week, Bronx Parking made its payment to bondholders only by tapping an emergency fund. The firm must make two more payments by next October — and it doesn’t have the cash.

There’s no mystery about what should happen: The bondholders should take their losses.

But not if Diaz gets his way. Last month, the beep issued a call to build a “world-class” hotel and conference center where one of the garages stands. The hotel would pay Bronx Parking for the space — “stabiliz[ing] the financial situation we face so that we can ultimately meet our obligations to the bondholders,” the company said….

Diaz’s proposal relies on fear of a bond-market panic, which would force another 2008-style bailout of sophisticated investors. Apparently, such bailouts are OK as long as they come in the form of useful goodies, like the promise of taxpayer-subsidized construction jobs for Bronx voters.

But bondholders need to be taught a lesson. It’s bad enough national taxpayers have too-big-to-fail banks. Local taxpayers don’t need too-big-to-fail parking lots.

If the bailout does happen, it will add to the already record-breaking figure of over $1 billion in government subsidies for the construction of the new Yankee Stadium and related facilities.

Fortunately, there is an easier solution. Yankees’ co-owner Hank Steinbrenner has recently denounced “socialism” in baseball in very strong terms. It’s clear that he doesn’t want his business dealings tainted by even the slightest whiff of socialistic subsidies.

The parking lot situation gives the Steinbrenners an opportunity to live up to their own principles. They can take some of the $1 billion they got in public subsidies for the stadium and use it to bail out the parking lot project, which, as Gelinas notes, the Yankees helped instigate in the first place. That would obviate the need for further “socialistic” subsidies for the lot and also remove some of the taint created by the original government subsidies for Yankee Stadium.

Hank Steinbrenner, a lonely parking lot turns its eyes to you!

The Red Sox and manager Terry Francona have decided to end their relationship in the wake of the teams’ painful September collapse. Despite the disappointing end to his tenure with the team, Francona will surely be remembered as the most successful Red Sox manager in almost a century, if not ever. During his eight years with the team, the Sox made five playoff appearances and won two world championships. Most important of all, they put an end to the Curse of the Bambino and repeatedly vanquished the Yankees. Even this year, they went 12-6 against them.

Francona was not a great tactical innovator like Earl Weaver or Tony LaRussa. But he still impressed me with his skill, as I followed the team closely during his tenure. His single greatest virtue was avoiding dumb mistakes. He rarely if ever lost a key game by doing something stupid. This is an underrated quality. Sabermetric analysis shows that it is much more common for managers to lose games by making foolish errors than to win them with some brilliant insight. Just ask Francona’s predecessor Grady Little, who provided a textbook example of the former in Game 7 of the 2003 American League Championship Series. Francona avoided those kinds of mistakes, in part because he was open to the use of sabermetric statistical analysis to guide his decisions.

Francona’s other great virtue was the way he handled the insane media circus surrounding the Red Sox and managed to work with the difficult personalities of some of the team’s stars. It is often said that the manager of the Red Sox gets more media and public scrutiny than the governor of Massachusetts or the mayor of Boston. No Red Sox manager in my lifetime handled it better than Francona. It also wasn’t easy for him to deal with petulant stars like Manny Ramirez. But he almost always managed it well.

Much ink will be spilled this winter over the causes of the Red Sox’ collapse this year. After going an MLB- best 81-42 over the previous several months, the team frittered away a possible division title and a 9 game lead in the wild card race by posting an abysmal 7-20 record in September. Having watched many of those games, I saw few tactical mistakes by Francona. Generally speaking, he picked the right players to use in each situation, given the available personnel. The team failed partly because of bad luck (they lost more than their share of close games that could have gone either way), partly because of injuries to key players (e.g. – Kevin Youkilis), and most importantly because too many players performed far below their usual standards, especially the pitchers. It’s hard to say how much blame Francona deserves for the latter factor. Probably at least some. But, on the other hand, veteran players like the Red Sox’ key stars should be able to motivate themselves. Ultimately, there is more than enough blame to go around. Francona, the players, and upper management will all get their share.

Regardless of what happened this year, Francona’s overall legacy is one of extraordinary success. Red Sox Nation owes him a great debt. After the immediate pain of this fall wears off, I think Boston fans will remember that. We should also remember what happened the last two times Boston teams suffered a painful collapse (the Red Sox in 2003 and the Bruins in 2010). In both cases, they won championships the very next year and also got revenge on those teams that defeated them the year before. So may it be with the Red Sox in 2012.

Historian Taylor Branch has a fascinating Atlantic article on the history of regulations forbidding pay for college athletes. He also makes a strong case for abolishing those rules and describes various legal challenges to them. I don’t agree with all of Branch’s analysis. For example, I’m not as optimistic as he is that lawsuits will soon lead to the end of the NCAA cartel. The Supreme Court has long interpreted the antitrust laws to exempt college sports, and it is unlikely to change its mind – both because a multibillion dollar industry has relied on those decisions and because the Court generally does not like reversing its statutory interpretation decisions.

But I do agree with Branch that the rules need to be changed. In any event, the article is well worth reading for anyone interested in the issue.

I myself made the case for allowing colleges to pay athletes here and here.

UPDATE: I should have said that the Supreme Court has long endorsed the view that the NCAA cartel forbidding payment of players does not violate the antitrust laws, as it said in this 1984 case:

In order to preserve the character and quality of the “product,” athletes must not be paid, must be required to attend class, and the like. And the integrity of the “product” cannot be preserved except by mutual agreement; if an institution adopted such restrictions unilaterally, its effectiveness as a competitor on the playing field might soon be destroyed. Thus, the NCAA plays a vital role in enabling college football to preserve its character, and as a result enables a product to be marketed which might otherwise be unavailable. In performing this role, its actions widen consumer choice – not only the choices available to sports fans but also those available to athletes – and hence can be viewed as procompetitive.

That’s not the same thing as saying that all restraints on trade in college sports are permitted, and I was wrong to inadvertently conflate the two issues.

And it today’s football-related legal news, the Washington Post reports that Washington Redskins owner Daniel Snyder has dropped his defamation suit against the Washington CityPaper over an unflattering story about him.

Snyder had sought $1 million in general damages as well as unspecified punitive damages from the weekly paper; its parent company, Creative Loafing; and journalist Dave McKenna. McKenna’s story in November, “The Cranky Redskins Fans’ Guide to Dan Snyder,” was an unflattering account of Snyder’s tenure as owner of Washington’s NFL team, with an encyclopedia-style listing of alleged missteps and public-relations controversies over the years. . . .

But people close to Snyder said the team’s owner felt vindicated when City Paper’s publisher, Amy Austin, acknowledged in a story published in April that one aspect of the story was not meant to be construed as literally true. . . .

In his original lawsuit, Snyder said he was defamed by several parts of the article, including the suggestion that he had been kicked out as chairman of the board of the Six Flags amusement park chain and had gone “all Agent Orange” by cutting down a stand of trees on federally protected land that blocked river views from his Potomac mansion in 2004. He also objected to the story’s assertion that he had been “caught forging names” on consumers’ long-distance phone contracts while he headed a marketing firm, Snyder Communications, before taking over the Redskins in 1999. He denied all of those allegations.

So I know that faithful readers have been patiently waiting for my take on the current goings-on in the world of international soccer … Though this is the off-season, of course, for most of the world’s leagues (other than our own MLS), there’s a fair bit of action out there, in particular (a) the Women’s World Cup, in Germany, and (b) the main South/Central American tournament, the Copa America, in Argentina.

Re the first: I’m not, generally speaking, much of a fan of the women’s game. Like women’s basketball, though the games can be exciting, there’s not enough skill and athleticism, usually, to hold my interest. But I have to say that the WWC games I’ve watched so far have been pretty damned good — the level of play is much higher than it’s been in the past, and some of the games — Germany-France (4-2), Sweden – US (2-1), Australia-Equatorial Guinea (3-2), and France-Canada (4-0), were fine matches, full of attacking play, near misses, great goals, and all the rest. The Germans look formidable, and will probably win it all – though my money is on Brazil (which plays the US tomorrow at noon, a match that, given the shaky back lines and strong attacks of both teams, could well be a 5-4 thriller …).

As to the Copa America, the big news there so far has all been pretty negative. The two giants of South American soccer — Brazil and Argentina — have looked uninspired (to put it mildly); Brazil was held to a boring 0-0 by Venezuela, pegged as one of the weaker teams in the tournament (Venezuela being one of the very few countries in the hemisphere where baseball, and not soccer, is the sport engaging the most passion); And the less said about Argentina’s performance the better; salvaging a 1-1 draw against Bolivia with a late goal, and then a truly awful performance in a 0-0 draw with Colombia. Their offense is sputtering miserably (and the home fans, needless to say, are deeply unhappy); Colombia easily had the best chances in the last match and should have come away with the victory. It’s proof (if proof were needed!) of the importance of mid-field playmakers; the Argentines have terrific strikers – at one point in the Colombia game they had four world-class strikers (Higuain, Messi, Tevez, and Aguero) playing at the same time, but still created virtually no offense to speak of. Messi – the consensus best player on the planet – looks lost; without the fabulous midfield play of Barcelona’s fabulous two providers (Xavi and Iniesta), he doesn’t seem to be able to get into the rhythm of the offense. It’s been painful to watch, actually — I’m a big fan of the Argentines, and I do hope they can get their act together in time to make at least some noise in the tournament.

The dark horse in the Copa America, to my eyes, is Chile; though one should never count out teams like Argentina and Brazil, with the unbelievable talent and skill on both teams, the Chileans have played the best and most exciting soccer in the tournament so far, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they went far, and possibly all the way.

Kent Russell of the new Grantland sports blog has a fascinating piece on the history of the Stanley Cup, hockey’s most prestigious trophy. Interestingly, the Lord Stanley after whom the cup is named was not a hockey fan and probably never even saw a hockey game in his life.

Let me also take this opportunity to point out yet again that the Cup was just won by the Boston Bruins!

As a Bruins fan for almost thirty years, and having waited all that time for a Stanley Cup win, I think this picture best expresses my feelings tonight:

In 2008, self-proclaimed “mavericks” had a terrible year in both sports and politics. This year, however, the underdog Dallas Mavericks just won the NBA title. Does that mean it will be a good year for political mavericks too? If so, who will benefit? Perhaps it will be vintage 2008 maverick Sarah Palin. But I’m skeptical that she would be as effective at running for president as Dirk Nowitzki is at basketball. We may soon find out.

The city of Allentown, Pennsylvania plans to use eminent domain, or at least the threat of it, to forcibly acquire downtown property for the construction of a minor league hockey arena [HT: my father-in-law Bruce Schmauch, a longtime Allentown resident]:

It was drop-the-gloves time in Allentown City Council chambers Wednesday night.

A parade of downtown merchants, their attorneys and supporters laid into city officials, saying their heavy-handed efforts to pressure them into selling their properties under threat of eminent domain to make way for a hockey arena would kill their livelihoods.

That didn’t stop council from voting 6-1 to authorize city officials to use eminent domain to acquire the holdouts….

One after another, merchants said they need more than just a few months to make a life-altering decision on whether to sell their properties and more information about the arena plan itself. They said they were given little information and inadequate offers of relocation assistance.

“Are you going to relocate my business, are you going to take care of my family, are you going to take care of my livelihood?” said Chong Lee, who operates New York Fashions on Hamilton Street.

In March, Pawlowski’s administration began approaching landowners with property in the one-block footprint of the arena between Hamilton, Linden, Seventh and Eighth streets with offers to buy their buildings. About half have cut deals with the city.

Pawlowski hopes to build a sports and entertainment complex centered on an $80 million to $100 million hockey arena that would be home to the minor league Phantoms, the farm team for the National Hockey League’s Philadelphia Flyers.

As is often the case, city officials are defending the use of eminent domain on the grounds that it will produce economic benefits for the community. However, as Kelo v. City of New London and many other cases show, such condemnations often destroy far more economic value than they create. In addition, numerous studies show that public subsidies for sports stadiums routinely fail to promote economic growth. This is true even of stadiums that house popular major league teams, much less minor league facilities like the one planned for Allentown.

The proposed Allentown taking may also run afoul of Pennsylvania’s post-Kelo eminent domain reform law, which forbids most takings that transfer property to a “private enterprise,” unless the land in question is “blighted” in tightly defined sense of the word (unlike the extremely broad definitions of “blight” that continue to prevail in many states, such as New York). I have seen downtown Allentown and it is clearly not blighted, as defined by the new law.

Unfortunately, Pennsylvania’s law has a crucial loophole that excludes the area around Pittsburgh and Philadelphia until 2012. But Allentown is probably too far from Philadelphia to be covered by that exception, though I welcome correction by experts in Pennsylvania law on this point.

I can’t make a definitive judgment about the legality of the proposed Allentown condemnation without knowing more about the details of the plan. But my initial impression is that it’s probably illegal under Pennsylvania’s post-Kelo reform law. Legal or not, the Allentown plan is yet another example of a dubious economic development taking that is likely to harm the community far more than it benefits it.

UPDATE: This story suggests that the new arena may be publicly owned, in which case it would not violate the post-Kelo eminent domain reform law. However, the same story and previous reports indicate that the development plan may include privately owned facilities and that the arena could be controlled by a private developer. Currently, the Allentown Economic Development Corporation, a private organization, is trying to acquire property for the arena, using the threat of eminent domain as leverage. If the AEDC is to be the owner of the arena, it would not qualify as a publicly owned stadium. We may not know whether the plan is legal or not until it becomes clear who will ultimately own and control the arena.

No team likes to get swept out of the playoffs. Just ask the top two seeds in the NHL playoffs, both of which were swept in the second round this week. Rarely, however, does a team respond as the Los Angeles Lakers have in the past few minutes. It was a pathetic display for a once proud franchise.

UPDATE: Here’s one report, and here’s an early account from the LA Times:

The game then started to turn chippy as [the Lakers' Lamar] Odom shoved [Dallas Maverick] Nowitzki for a flagrant foul 2 and Odom was tossed from the game. Nowitzki made the technicals. The referees were concerned about losing control and called a quick foul on [Laker] Ron Artest to let the players know to dial things down.

But it didn’t work. [Dallas'] Jose Barea drove the lane and [Laker] Andrew Bynum elbowed him in the ribs while he was in the air. Barea landed hard on the court and Bynum was also thrown out of the game when a flagrant foul 2 was called with the Mavericks up by 32.

SECOND UPDATE: Here’s the video.

A somewhat dispirited series of highly-anticipated matches between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid was elevated to high art through the remarkable play of the remarkable Lionel Messi. If you didn’t see his goals in Wednesday’s game — the second one in particular is a thing of sublime beauty — check them out

here (the UEFA official website, with a pretty niggardly 45 second clip)

or here (from a broadcast clip of the 2d goal)

The matches have been dispiriting because Jose Mourinho (Madrid’s coach) made the tactical decision to play the most conservative brand of static football imaginable, in the hopes of suffocating Barcelona’s attack. He’s got no faith, as my son Sam put it, that his players can compete with Barcelona if both teams are attacking. Aside from the fact that the strategy is failing, it has deprived us of what could have been some magnificent games – Madrid showed last weekend, in demolishing a very good Valencia side (on the road, no less) 6 -3, that they have the potential to be a terrific attacking side, and a game in which the two teams were at their attacking best could been truly wonderful side to watch.

But at least — thank goodness — there’s Messi. I know I’ve said it before, but it does bear repeating – we’re lucky to be around to watch him. Those Madrid defenders he’s running by are not clumsy oafs, or statues – they are world-class soccer players, made to look like clumsy oafs and statues. And they’re not the ones with a ball bouncing around unpredictably at their feet!! Jordan, Gretzky, Ruth – sometimes someone not only is better than everyone else in the world at what they do, but better by a prodigious margin, and it’s really something to see.

And while I’m on the subject of spectacular feats on the athletic field: where did the often-repeated trope that “Hitting a baseball from a major league pitcher is the hardest thing to do in sports” come from?? It is demonstrably false. Think about the pitchers, when they’re at the plate. They’re pretty lousy hitters, as a rule – a batting average of .150 or even lower is the norm. But that means once or twice, in every ten at-bats, they not only manage to hit the ball, they hit it well enough to get a base hit! I know they’re terrific athletes, and that most of them spent a lot of time practicing their hitting as teenagers. But the hardest thing in all of sports!?? If that was the hardest thing to do in all of sports, surely we’d expect that people who hardly ever practice it wouldn’t be able to succeed at it, wouldn’t we?

. . . is.** [see note below] But on a day when our sports pages are filled up with loads of nonsense — about whether Barry Bonds knew what every 12 year-old in America knew (that Bonds was taking steroids), and about whether Kobe Bryant’s utterance of an “anti-gay epithet” that is apparently so nasty that the NY Times can’t even bring itself to tell us what it is deserves a whopping $100,000 fine — real money, even to Kobe Bryant! — it’s nice to bring the discussion around to a sporting event where what is about to happen between the lines, on the field of play, could really turn out to be something most extraordinary.

If you have friends who have a passion for the world’s game (or are Spaniards), you might want to cut them a little slack over the next few weeks. Soccer fans around the world are now in a state of high heat about an unprecedented series of encounters about to take place between two of the real giants of international soccer, FC Barcelona and Real Madrid. The two teams, who ordinarily meet twice per year, are going to play 4 times over the next 3 weeks — their regular meeting (this Saturday afternoon 4 PM EDT) in the Spanish League (in Madrid), the Final of the Spanish Cup tournament (the Copa del Rey) in midweek, and then twice (home and home) in the semifinals of the big all-Europe soccer competition, the Champions League (April 27 and May 3).

It’s enough to make a soccer fan go mad – Spain will almost certainly grind to a complete halt (not great news for its bondholders, given its current economic woes), and much of the rest of world will at least slow down noticeably. It does indeed seem too good to be true. For any number of reasons, this could well be a truly epic matchup. To begin with, Barcelona and Madrid may well be, at the moment, the two best teams in the world; only Manchester United is really in that conversation right now. Madrid got spanked when they last met — a stunning and humiliating 5-0 defeat in Barcelona; but that was back in the mid-Fall, and virtually all observers agree that Madrid has gotten its act together and started to play a very different brand of soccer over the last few months.

Watching the two best teams in the world play four times in three weeks would be a treat in any circumstances – it’s just a million times more delicious that it’s Madrid and Barca. In a world full of great sports rivalries — a very partial and incomplete list would probably have to include (and I’ll surely offend many of you here) Yankees-Red Sox, the great US college football rivalries (Texas – Oklahoma, Michigan – Ohio State), maybe Celtics-Lakers, Bears-Packers . . . and many terrific soccer rivalries overseas as well (Inter Milan – AC Milan, Man U – Liverpool, Boca Juniors – River Plate in Buenos Aires, Galatasaray – Fehnerbache in Istanbul . . .) — Barcelona-Madrid has a very strong claim to being the greatest of all. The history alone assures that. Madrid, of course, was Franco’s team – his favorite, and he showered it with affection, and prestige, and financial emoluments. And Franco was no friend to the Catalonians, to put it mildly; at a time when all expressions of Catalonian culture were brutally suppressed by Franco’s administration (in Madrid), you could still root for FC Barcelona, and rooting for Barca thereby became a kind of reference point for Catalonian (and, not coincidentally, anti-Franco and anti-Fascist) identity. And all this, remember, is not some old tale out of the history books; it’s within living memory for millions of people (Franco’s reign of terror having ended only in the 1970s).

So there’s that. And there’s plenty of other stuff to give the games even more spice. Madrid’s coach, Jose Mourinho, was hired this year because he, supposedly, has the secret to beating Barcelona; last year, when he coached for Inter Milan, he beat the Catalonians in the Champions League semifinals (and went on to hoist the trophy in the Final) — though that 5-0 drubbing in the Fall put a dent in his reputation on that score. And then there’s the contrast between Madrid’s collection of international superstars plucked from other teams for outrageous amounts of money — Christiano Ronaldo from Manchester United, Kaka from AC Milan, Benzema from Marseille, Xabi Alonso from Liverpool, . . . — and Barcelona’s remarkable group of entirely homegrown stars — Xavi Hernandez, Iniesta, Pique, Puyol, and, of course, the transcendent Lionel Messi.

It all seems to good to be true. We shall see. Tune in, if you’re looking for some fantastic soccer.
***************
** I’ve been having a debate with a colleague about whether the correct form of the expression is:

“If it seems too good to be true, it probably is” [i.e., it is too good to actually be true] or

“If it seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.” [i.e., it probably isn't true]

It’s rather odd that both forms work and express the same idea … but I vote for the former as the clearer and cleaner of the two]

Canada is in the midst of an important election campaign. Many important issues are at stake, including the state of the Canadian economy, crucial foreign policy decisions, and others. Nonetheless, the leaders of most of the contending parties have asked for the postponement of an upcoming debate between them to avoid a schedule conflict with a Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff game:

A move is afoot to reschedule a federal election debate slated for Thursday so it doesn’t conflict with the opening game of the Montreal Canadiens’ first-round playoff series against the Boston Bruins.

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe got the ball rolling Sunday by saying there’s little doubt hockey-mad Montreal fans will choose the game over the debate.

NDP Leader Jack Layton later echoed those sentiments, the Liberals followed suit, and the Conservatives said they could live with whatever the debate broadcasters decide.

Bloc leader Duceppe wants other party leaders to join him in urging the consortium of broadcasters who organize the debate to move it back a day….

“We all know that hockey is very popular in Canada and in Quebec, which is why it would be a better idea to push the French debate back to allow hockey fans to watch the debate as well as the game on Thursday night.”

As a longtime Boston Bruins fan, I’m well aware of how popular hockey is in Quebec. At the same time, I’m sure that most Canadian voters recognize that the election is ultimately more important than the outcome of a hockey game, especially one that is merely a first-round playoff matchup. Why, then, would most of them tune in to the game instead of the debate?

The obvious answer is that the game is likely to be far more entertaining. But that still doesn’t fully explain the situation. Surely sacrificing an hour or two of entertainment is a small price to pay for becoming better-informed about a crucial public decision.

The real explanation is probably rational political ignorance. Because any one vote has only a tiny chance of actually determining the outcome of an election, most voters have little incentive to become informed about political issues. If a random hockey-loving Quebec voter knew that his decision would definitely determine the result of the election or even have, say, a 10% chance of doing so, he would probably watch the debate instead of the game. But in the real world, there is only a tiny chance that his vote will have any impact, so he feels free to turn the channel to the game instead.

For a very well-informed voter, of course, watching the debate won’t be useful because she probably already knows most of the points the party leaders will make. But most Canadians, like most Americans, have fairly low levels of political knowledge. Ironically, the low-information voters who could increase their knowledge levels the most are probably the least likely to watch the debate because they have the lowest level of interest in politics.

Thanks to rational political ignorance, only the most dedicated Quebec political fans are likely to watch the debate if it conflicts with a Canadiens playoff game. Interestingly, however, sports fans and political fans actually have a lot in common: Both enjoy rooting for their preferred “teams” and hating the teams’ rivals, and both tend to evaluate information in a highly biased way.

Having finished this post, I will now go back to preparing to root for the Bruins in Thursday’s game. If the favored Bruins play up to their potential, Habs fans will wish they had spent the night watching a political debate instead! Of course since I’m an admittedly biased Bruins fan, that’s exactly what you would expect me to say.

Tonight is the NCAA basketball championship game. At the risk of being a party-pooper, I would like to focus on a serious injustice associated with college sports: the existence of a cartel that prevents college athletes from being paid. Economist Gary Becker summarizes the arguments against the cartel here:

Every year prior to this final tournament, and sometimes even during the tournament, different violations become public of NCAA rules on behavior of players and coaches. Violations of these rules by colleges are to be expected because the rules are basically an attempt by the NCAA to suppress competition among schools for college basketball and football players, the two most lucrative and most watched college sports, and thereby increase the profits to schools from these sports.

The toughest competition for basketball and football players occurs at the Division I level. These sports have both large attendances at games-sometimes, more than 100,000 persons attend college football games- and widespread television coverage…. Absent the rules enforced by the NCAA, the competition for players would stiffen, especially for the big stars…

To avoid that outcome, the NCAA sharply limits the number of athletic scholarships, and even more importantly, limits the size of the scholarships that schools can offer the best players….

It is impossible for an outsider to look at these rules without concluding that their main aim is to make the NCAA an effective cartel that severely constrains competition among schools for players. The NCAA defends these rules by claiming that their main purpose is to prevent exploitation of student-athletes, to provide a more equitable system of recruitment that enables many colleges to maintain football and basketball programs and actively search for athletes, and to insure that the athletes become students as well as athletes.

Unfortunately for the NCAA, the facts are blatantly inconsistent with these defenses….

A large fraction of the Division I players in basketball and football, the two big money sports, are recruited from poor families; many of them are African-Americans from inner cities and rural areas. Every restriction on the size of scholarships that can be given to athletes in these sports usually takes money away from poor athletes and their families, and in effect transfers these resources to richer students in the form of lower tuition and cheaper tickets for games…

That players are recruited as students as well as athletes applies to a considerable extent to Stanford, Duke, Notre Dame, and a few other Division I schools that have high academic standards. The NCAA points out that the overall average graduation rate is about the same for student-athletes as it is for other students. That result also applies to African American and Hispanic students. However, the graduation rates for these minority students-athletes are depressingly low. For example, the average graduation rate of Division I African American basketball and football players appears to be less than 50%.

Some of the top players quit school to play in the NBA or NFL, but that is a tiny fraction of all athletes who dropout. The vast majority dropout either because they use up their sports eligibility before they completed the required number of classes, or they failed to continue to make the teams.

I made similar criticisms of the cartel in this post written on the night of last year’s NCAA championship game. There, I noted that the NCAA cartel is not just a private arrangement. It is propped up by the federal government, which uses the threat of denying federal funding to force schools to comply with cartel rules. If this federal intervention were lifted, the cartel might well fall apart. I also pointed out that many Division I athletes get little benefit from their “free” education, because they cannot possibly do well in classes most are academically unprepared for while simultaneously holding down what amounts to a full-time job playing football or basketball.

Richard Posner tentatively defends the cartel in this post. His main argument is that “eliminating the NCAA cartel… would make colleges and universities poorer, and this would be a social loss if one assumes (plausibly) that higher education creates external benefits.” But even if colleges and universities do create external benefits, it doesn’t follow that the cartel is justified. Posner provides no evidence showing that higher education would be underfinanced in the absence of the cartel. The fact that some institution creates external benefits does not prove that any and every increase in its resources is necessarily a good thing. Even if it would be, there are other ways to raise money for schools that are not as inefficient and arbitrarily unjust as the cartel.

Forget Wisconsin, unless you’re worrying whether the Green Bay Packers will get a chance to repeat.  Now that negotiations between the National Football League’s team owners and players’ union have stalled, the real labor fight is just beginning.  After the sides failed to reach an agreement, the players’ union decertified and several players filed an antitrust suit against the league.  It’s what one writer calls “football armageddon,” though the Sports Law Professor thinks a lockout makes sense.

Which side is to blame for the impasse?  On the one hand, there’s ample evidence the owners have been planning for a lockout for several years, even going so far as to negotiate a deal with the television networks to pay to televise games even if they aren’t played due to a work stoppage.  On the other hand, it appears the owners offered the players a substantial number of last-minute concessions that the NFLPA refused.  Now the dispute may be resolved in court.

One thing’s for certain, it’s only March, but the 2011-12 season is at risk.  Does this mean I’ll have to watch soccer?

Police in Montreal are reportedly looking into a brutal hit by the Boston Bruins’ Zdeno Chara on the Montreal Canadiens’ Max Pacioretty.  The hit produced a major penalty and game misconduct, but did not result in a suspension, even though Pacioretty suffered a concussion and broken vertebrae.  I suspect the NHL’s failure to discipline Chara is one reason Montreal authorities are contemplating action.  According to ESPN, Pacioretty said he thinks the NHL let Chara off light, but thinks criminal prosecution would be unwarranted: “I have no desire for him to be prosecuted legally. I feel that the incident, as ugly as it was, was part of a hockey game.”

I’m here in Torino, Italy, getting ready for my talk tomorrow at the Nexa Center of the Torino Politecnico on “Thomas Jefferson, The Internet, and Egypt” — the talk will be livestreamed Friday at 0830 EST here, if you’re interested. I’ve been thinking a lot about the events in the Middle East, and what they mean for the Internet and Internet law, but I need some time to get my thoughts together on all that; I hope to be posting a series of essays when I return.

But whatever happens at my talk tomorrow, the highlight of my European trip this week has already occurred. My son Sam and I were privileged to be at the Camp Nou, FC Barcelona’s stadium, along with 95,000 of our closest friends, on Tuesday night for the extraordinary match between FC Barcelona and Arsenal FC to decide a spot in the final 8 of the UEFA European Champions League. Suffice it to say that it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced, in or out of a sports arena. Our seats were way down low, and lemme tell you, hearing 95,000 people, from the bottom of the bowl, in FULL VOICE, singing the FC Barcelona anthem, or whistling at the ref, is simply indescribable. The electricity in the place was palpable and almost terrifying. Barcelona’s attack was relentless, wave after wave after wave … And when the great Lionel Messi scored the first goal at the end of the first half — a goal that the newspapers here in Italy are already calling one of the greatest ever scored* (if you haven’t seen it, check it out here (before UEFA, in its wisdom, orders it taken down from Youtube) — Sam and I (and everyone else in the place) went totally berserk. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen people in that state before, let alone 95,000 of them. Unforgettable indeed. We took this trip because Barcelona, this year, may well be the best team ever assembled anywhere, and we figured we couldn’t possibly let the opportunity pass to see them in person — and boy, was that the right call.

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*The headline in today’s Corriere della Sera:
“Il segreto della meraviglia Messi? Giocare alla velocita’ del pensiero. Guardiola in estasi: ‘E il gol piu bello che Leo abbia mai segnato.’”

“The secret of the marvelous Messi? To play at the speed of thought. Guardiola in ecstasy: ‘It was the most beautiful goal that Leo has ever scored.’”

Former world chess champion Gary Kasparov has a fascinating review of the new biography of Bobby Fischer written by Frank Brady [HT: Tyler Cowen]. Kasparov reflects on the fascinating contrast between Fischer’s incredible insight and rationality at the chessboard and the paranoid delusions that eventually destroyed his life away from the board. I briefly wrote about Fischer here when he passed away three years ago.

It is tempting to conclude from Fischer’s story that child chess prodigies are likely to descend into madness. But that doesn’t seem to be true as a general rule. Kasparov himself was almost as much a prodigy as Fischer, yet he has been very successful in his life away from chess. The Polgar sisters seem similarly sucessful and happy. Back in 1987, I met Boris Spassky, the man whom Fischer defeated for the world championship, and a major child chess prodigy in his own right. Spassky was friendly and personable, and very articulate in both Russian and English. By all accounts, he seems well-adjusted and relatively normal. Ironically, Brady recounts that Spassky was one of the very few people who managed to get along with Fischer even after the latter’s descent into madness and paranoia.

New York Yankees co-owner Hank Steinbrenner recently denounced Major League Baseball’s revenue-sharing system, calling it “socialism”:

Yankees co-chairman Hank Steinbrenner [the other co-owner/co-chairman is Hank's brother Hal] says baseball’s revenue sharing and luxury tax programs need changes…..

“We’ve got to do a little something about that, and I know Bud wants to correct it in some way,” Steinbrenner said. “Obviously, we’re very much allies with the Red Sox and the Mets, the Dodgers, the Cubs, whoever in that area.”

“At some point, if you don’t want to worry about teams in minor markets, don’t put teams in minor markets, or don’t leave teams in minor markets if they’re truly minor,” Steinbrenner said. “Socialism, communism, whatever you want to call it, is never the answer.”

I don’t have a strong view about the revenue-sharing system. As a tool for maintaining competitive balance, it’s much less effective than the salary caps adopted by the NFL, NBA, and NHL. Moreover, the revenue-sharing system suffers from the flaw that the low-payroll teams that receive the money paid in by wealthier franchises can simply put the money into their owners’ pockets, as opposed to investing it in improving their teams.

That said, comparing MLB revenue-sharing to socialism is absurd. Socialism is government control of the economy, not a private arrangement to divide up profits from a joint enterprise. You might as well say that a law firm is “socialistic” if individual partners don’t keep all the profit generated by the clients they bring in, and instead have to transfer some of it to the other partners.

If the Steinbrenners really believe that socialism is “never the answer,” however, they should return the record $1.2 billion in government subsidies that they recently got for the building of the new Yankee Stadium. Even the USSR never spent so much public money on a sports stadium.

Government subsidies for private sports stadiums fall short of full-blown socialism (under which the state would own all stadiums as well as pay for them). But they come a lot closer to it than MLB revenue-sharing. Since the Steinbrenners clearly want to avoid even the slightest hint of socialism in their business dealings, I expect that their check to the long-suffering taxpayers will be in the mail soon.

Inasmuch as I feel it has become my duty to inform VC readers of extraordinary happenings in the world of international soccer, I’m writing to announce what those of you who follow these matters already know: today, at 245 PM (EST) (televised on Fox Soccer Channel) Barcelona travel to the Emirates Stadium in London to take on Arsenal in the first of two matches in the Round of 16 of Europe’s Champions League competition. [And yes, the rumors are true - I am indeed heading to Barcelona for the second match between the two on March 8] It promises to be a delightful affair — Barcelona this year, to many soccer fans, is not only probably the best team on the planet at the moment, but quite possibly the best team ever – and surely the most beautiful to watch. And Arsenal, though (imho) not quite up to Barcelona’s level in terms of overall talent and teamwork, nonetheless plays the same kind of game – free-flowing, short-passing, delicate and intricate — as their Spanish visitors. And neither team goes in for the kind of defense-minded bunker mentality stuff that often afflicts teams at the highest level 9and that can make soccer a bit of a snooze sometimes to watch). It should be, as they say, a cracker. Not to be missed.